The Seductions of Natalie Bach — William Luvas

Still in high school, Natalie Bach wanders the streets of New York, visiting studios of hip artists, experimenting with sex and searching for her sexual identity. She flies on the city's energy, experiencing jubilant highs and grinding lows-in fights with her spiteful mother, sessions with her psychiatrist, one night stands, and a painful, unrequited love affair with playboy Claude. She attends The Art Students' League and takes her first steps toward becoming an artist. Natalie haunts the apartment of her friend and former teacher, Maxine, a steamy seductress whose intensity matches Natalie's. Charged with urgency and confusion, their friendship blossoms into a love affair, leaving Natalie confused about her sexual identity. 

Natalie's journey of self-discovery takes her cross-country to live in the redwoods, to Israel, and back to New York again. She is both seduced and seductress, an impressionable girl who epitomizes the rebellious spirit of the sixties, defying convention to live life on her own terms.

The Seductions of Natalie Bach documents a heady girl's coming of age at a heady time, and her wide-eyed discovery of the wondrous, remarkably confusing world around her. Natalie flees her family and upper-middle-class Jewish background to discover life on her own terms. Narrated in the first person by Natalie and her friend Maxine. 


Little, Brown nominated Seductions for The National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner Award. Independent  film producer George Paaswell optioned film rights for the book. 


"But now there were new stirrings in America and Nat as excited about them as the
rest of us....Village coffee houses and St. Marks Church poetry readings, featuring Le
Roi Jones and Allen Ginsberg. A new energy in the air, legacy of the old but pursued
by a generation that knew nothing of immigration and celebrated its opposite. All of
us felt it-from Puerto Ricans who came across Tompkins Square Park to Beat poets
who wrote about them. A living lab where people played possibilities. Zen, sex and
chemicals. You felt at the heart of it just walking the streets-garbage littered, dog shit
filthy, but charged with the incessant hum of conversation from cafes, bars, sprawl-
ing furniture-nude lofts and shotgun flats, where revolution was stashed under floor-
boards and death lurked in the eye of a needle. Poetry howls, ecstasy moans. Every
day more appearing: runaways from every backwater in America discovering them-
selves in long hair and yeast infections and Bob Dylan and Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds, in seemingly perpetual beatitude amid the unblessed gray hulks and
urine stench."
          Excerpt from The Seductions of Natalie Bach
　

"The novel has the feel of one written by a native of the city [New York], though Luvaas grew up in Oregon....He describes its grittiness, its romance and despair, with a poetry that makes the novel satisfying and intelligent reading."
Jonathan Ward, Prospect Press